For most companies that I've worked for, pushback is normal and expected as long as you've built some trust/rapport with your management chain.

However with AI, it feels different. I have seen both technical and non-technical managers tell engineers something to the effect of "you aren't prompting correctly" if they aren't able to get the task done within some preferred time frame.

We are seeing the industry revive metrics like lines of code, number of tickets closed, bug's found (looking at you Mythos), and now even "tokenmaxxing". It's exhausting to push back on. These are all things that we know will be gamed. But the individual that brings this up might be viewed as "anti-ai" or something.

If you're an IC, I do think the best thing to do is just go along with it. Sooner or later we will see more shocked-pikachu-faced executives when they realize that engineers are spending tokens just for the sake of it.